I wouldn't answer the marijuana questions. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried." -- George W. Bush

The last three American presidents have taken three different approaches to questions about their familiarity with marijuana. Bill Clinton told the preposterous tale that he attempted to get high but couldn't manage to inhale the smoke into his lungs. George W. Bush never publicly acknowledged using illegal drugs but was surreptitiously recorded telling a friend why he had kept quiet. He didn't want children to think smoking marijuana was OK. Barack Obama has been the most candid. Obama's response to the drug question in 2006 mocked Clinton's failed attempt to seem both edgy and innocent. "When I was a kid, I inhaled," Obama said. "That was the point."

The biographies of those three American presidents put the lie to the story we tell most of our children: that using drugs will likely ruin their lives. For some people that is true - as it is true for alcohol - but most people who use drugs don't get hooked on drugs. And even those who do get hooked aren't necessarily a threat to society. But our drug laws suggest that drug usage is by itself a menace that requires the most drastic of responses from the state.

Our prisons are filled with people whose crime was doing the same thing our last three American presidents did. We'll stop short of saying that America's and Louisiana's sentencing addiction has derailed the ascent of a potential president. But there should be no gainsaying the suggestion that our drug laws have wrecked innumerable lives, that they funneled people who could be employed into our prisons instead.

Could that be the point? Could it be that the primary function of our draconian drug laws is to keep our prisons in the black? Those laws may be ruining the employment opportunities for many of our cities poor young residents, but for those who live near a rural prison, those laws all but guarantee them work. An economy that's built on the imprisonment of drug users isn't an economy worth having.

And if success in our society largely depends on not getting caught with drugs, then morality compels us to start decreasing the consequences for those who do.

Sen. J.P. Morrell has written a bill that would make marijuana possession a misdemeanor offense in all cases. If lawmakers were honest about the overwhelming number of people who have used drugs without their lives falling apart, the bill would pass easily. But if they take the George W. Bush route and maintain the fiction that drug usage is a certain impediment to success, then they'll vote to maintain the status quo.

If lawmakers care about poor people in our cities not having their lives destroyed for exhibiting the same behavior as wealthier folks in our suburbs, they'll change our laws posthaste. But if they listen to our district attorneys who use those laws to tighten the screws on defendants or to our sheriffs who get rich on inmates, then lawmakers will likely fixate on the horror stories involving drugs.

In George W. Bush's secretly recorded conversations with Doug Wead, a former aide to George H.W. Bush, he tells Wead, "I wouldn't answer the marijuana questions. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried." The recordings are made between 1998 and Bush accepting the 2000 Republican nomination for president. But he is already critical of Al Gore, the man who would be his opponent. Gore had admitted smoking marijuana.

If parents want to lie to their children, if they want to edit their histories and pretend that they didn't do drugs, that's their prerogative. But our criminal laws should be more honest. Those laws should only treat as felonies behaviors that pose a real threat to society.

Smoking pot ain't one of them.

Chat with Jarvis DeBerry about Louisiana's drug laws and the attempts to change them Tuesday at noon at NOLA.com.